THE HAVE'S AND THE HAVE NOTS

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What we are going to talk about today is a theme that we have discussed repeatedly before, but we are going to reemphasize in this lecture. That theme is the struggle in today's world between the haves and the have-nots. Now we are going to start off this lecture by confronting political fantasy and political lies in a very direct manner. At the Republican convention the wife of the Republican candidate, Mrs. Trump, quoted without attribution — there was some controversy about this — but the point is that she shared the views of the wife of the current president that " in America you can be what ever you want to be." Now just stop and think about the utter lunacy of that statement. In other words, if every American citizen wanted to be a billionaire they could become a billionaire. Really, in a word, no. This is lunatic trash and there is also a question as to whether it's very deceitful trash because this kind of nonsense is used to prop up the legitimacy of a society that has the highest levels of inequality in the industrialized world. America we might say also has the lowest levels of class mobility in the industrialized world, but if you distribute nonsense like this politically it gives everybody kind of a warm fuzzy feeling that the whole system is therefore legitimate, because after all, if there's all this opportunity and anybody can be whatever they want to be, then why should there be any discussion about social justice or questions about the rule of the super-rich and the plutocrats and so on? But again we need we need to recognize this for what it is, a lie, an absurdity. A very dangerous lie because it tends to lead to the poor and the people on the losing end blaming themselves for their problems. So we need to just confront that right away as an idiotic lie, which raises questions about the whole structure of American society since it is endorsed by the wife of the current president and the wife of the Republican presidential candidate.

Now let's confront another lie here, when Mr. George Bush put forth his education reform plan he called it "no child left behind." Well here's the problem with that — well there is some good news — a year ago Romania beat out America for having the most rotten record in terms of child poverty, but prior to that America was number one. Number one in child poverty. What a disgrace. And what a really criminal situation. Really a society that involves in engages in what can only be described as economic child abuse. Now you are to call program " no child left behind" in a social nightmare like America. It's a lie. Let's get the truth out there. That's a lie. It's a total and complete lie. Now we also have to ask why are these lies are put out there. They are put out to justify those in power. Now when you look at America today, you have a society based on a gigantic debt bubble. America has been running chronic budget deficits ever since Reagan launched his lunacy and under Clinton they did briefly balance the budget — which Clinton deserves some credit for — and then under George Bush, a hydrogen bomb was basically dropped on the federal budget with a combination of crazy tax cuts for the rich, which Mr. Bush assured us would generate budget surpluses, they generated massive budget deficits and the political system is so broken and so corrupt these tax cuts for the super-rich were never repealed. Meanwhile, investment oriented tax cuts for the rich, which might've generated economic growth such as estate tax reform, were never really put through, such as reducing estate taxes; instead they had these mindless consumption oriented tax cuts for the super-rich. So they led to trillions of dollars in deficits which are still going on. Obama made them permanent. And then you had more ominously the collapse of America's position in international trade.

Now Clinton balanced the budget deficit, but under Clinton, the bottom virtually fell out of America's position in international trade and this is led to a $-7 trillion in losses. No we are not supporters of Mr. Trump. We as an organization cannot endorse a candidate, though many of us were sympathetic to the ideas of Sen. Bernie Sanders, but there's been a lot of criticism of Mr. Trump's view of America, that it's dystopian, that he presents a dark view of America. President Obama said "let's go out in the morning and see the sun shining and things are just great and so on." Well Mr. President, let me educate you. In 1788, in France, the sun was shining. People were walking around. Everything was normal. In 1988 in Moscow, the sun was shining. Things were normal. But in societies that are deeply sick, the sun shining and things are normal until they stop being normal and things go down very fast. Now let's cut to the chase here relating to Obama. Obama did a good job in preventing the entire world economy from collapsing due to the disasters of Bush in 2009. We have to give PresidentObama credit for that. Unfortunately for reasons known only to himself, he concluded that he then solved all the problems and then went on singing happy days are here again. He did not solve the problems. We also need to discuss what has happened since 2009. Since 2009, the major capitalist states, in America, in England, in Japan and in the EU, you have the creation of trillions of dollars in what you might call "helicopter money." Money printed out of thin air, which has gone to the super-rich to prop things up. In other words, under Obama you have had the greatest welfare for the rich program in the history of the world, not just the history of this country. It has been done through the central bank, the Federal Reserve Board, and people say well it didn't raise the consumer price index. True it didn't, and here's why folks, because the money didn't go to consumers it went to the super-rich. On the other hand the super-rich price index, the stock market, luxury real estate, have gone through the roof, so have the super-rich price indexes, and here's the problem with that. Since these things have been artificially inflated, what goes up has a tendency to come down if it's not being sent up by natural forces. What you have today around the world is a hyper bubble where the Obama and the leaders of the capitalist West have inflated a new bubble to paper over an old bubble.

Now this isn't going to end well, it's not, okay. It's not going to end well, and here are some basic problems. The major capitalist states are largely out of ammunition if another crisis hits. One of our favorites was in terms of sound leadership — we're being sarcastic just in case people don't get that — was the budget deal to fund infrastructure, since the American politicians were too gutless and too corrupt to raise the gas tax, which America is the only major state that doesn't have a serious gas tax, they raided $50 billion of emergency funds for the next financial crash. So you can figure out how that gets us set up if things go wrong. And also the Dodd Frank bill contains a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, while the Dodd Frank bill contained a lot of good stuff, it contains a lot of dangerous bureaucratic nonsense that could restrict the ability to deal with the next crash. Meanwhile, the EU has put through rules that would have a similar effect in a future banking crisis, which are already creating problems for the major banks in Italy. So this is not a happy situation and what's coming is a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. And that's what that's the way you need to look at this. There's going to be a bloody struggle between the haves and the have-nots.

Now on a global level with the green revolution and other huge debts against the future, which are discussed on our website, you have an environmental hyper bubble which has been pumped up. Now these bubbles are not going to end well. They never do in history. On a global level you're going to have, on an internal basis, even in the developed states, you're going to have a lot of people for whom the whole great casino of democracy, plutocracy, capitalism, is going to be...put it in videogame terms, put a smile on it and a happy face...this is going to be a case of "game over" in terms of their lives. That's right. And a lot of people are going to end up on the losing end of this and end up dead. So they're not going to be too enthusiastic about that. No they're not. This is going to lead to a lot of turmoil. Now we will discuss further aspects of this in coming lectures, but it's important to understand that this is the way things are, and so don't listen to President Obama's happy talk rubbish. We suggest fasten your seatbelts, put your tray table up in the upright position, high levels of turbulence coming in the current political and economic order that runs our planet.